StarTrek.com has both an exclusive First Look at seven pages of the book’s introduction and also behind-the-scenes details about the creation/inspiration for the book, as provided by Barnes & Noble…

Our editorial team had been wanting for some time to add a Star Trek-themed title to our collectible editions line and when we realized that 2016 would mark the 50th anniversary of the original Star Trek television series we saw a golden opportunity. The book’s editor remembered reading as a teenager the twelve Star Trek collections published between 1967 and 1977 for which science fiction writer James Blish adapted the scripts for all of the episodes from the original series as short stories. Working with our partners at Penguin Random House, who published the original story collections, we chose the forty-five episodes that we thought Star Trek fans would instantly recognize as classics: “The Menagerie” and “The City on the Edge of Forever,” both of whose scripts won science fiction’s prestigious Hugo Award; “The Trouble with Tribbles”; “The Doomsday Machine;” and episodes that had originally been scripted by Harlan Ellison, Robert Bloch, Richard Matheson, Theodore Sturgeon, Norman Spinrad, David Gerrold, and other leading science fiction writers. CBS generously provided our design team with the artwork that adorns the book’s bonded-leather case, and production stills of the cast and the USS Enterprise that we use for endpapers. The result is a book that we hope will thrill Star Trek fans and pay tribute to a landmark of our popular culture.